"I do not consider Volodarsky my teacher - he did bad translations"

The special screening of the Cop Out film on July 10 in Kazan included live dubbing by the famous Goblin. After an autograph session, Dmitry Puchkov gave a press conference at Tatar-inform’s studio.

One of Russia’s best-known film translators came to Kazan from Moscow, where he had presented a translation of the Oscar-winning Cohen brothers’ picture A Serious Man. In Kazan, and later in Samara, he introduces the film Cop Out, starring Bruce Willis and the popular comedian Tracy Morgan. Kevin Smith’s comedy about two detectives searching for a very rare and extremely expensive baseball card stolen from one of them seems to be just Puchkov’s cup of tea, since he worked in the force for 6 years. The film is shown in the original language, and Goblin provides live translation sitting in the hall or in a specially equipped cabin. This allows the viewers hear the Hollywood stars’s real voices without having to read subtitles.

Goblin’s translations fall into two groups, he says, “funny translations” and “accurate translations”. An “accurate translation” implies a film has been translated with great precision, all the lines impeccably reproducing the original lines’s meaning and sentiment. Obscenities are translated as obscenities, and literary speech is literary speech.

A “funny translation” by Goblin is a parody rendition through ironic reinvention of the storyline, applied to the original video. Goblin has so far produced 6 “funny” translations of The Lord of the Rings: Brotherhood of the Ring, The Lord of the Ring: Two Towers, The Lord of the Ring: The Return of the King, The Matrix, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and the Russian-made Boomer.

Q: Is this your first time in Kazan?
A: I have been here at least four times. In the 6-7th grades at school they took us on a river cruise from Gorky to Adler, with a stopover in Kazan. Anyway, I would like this time to see the city, to have a “grownup” impression.

Q: Kazan hosts a Muslim film festival. Could you do a funny translation of films that have become iconic for many people?
A: No. I do not understand what is laughable, if this is a Muslim film festival, since the programme mostly includes films dwelling on religion.

Q: You presented Cop Out in Kazan. How predictable was the audience’s reaction?
A: Cop Out is an exceptionally funny film. It is on the one hand simple but on the other extremely cheery.

The audience’s reaction is always quite predictable. People who come to such shows are well-prepared and familiar with my work. Everyone watches and responds proportionately – everyone always gets a kick out of it. In Kazan everyone had fun, too.

Q: Dmitry, your shows with live translation are a very positive sign for our film market, since this is a fresh, interesting trend. Besides, you usually translate films for a small audience, which doubles the pleasure when they find their way to film theatres. Do you think American films with accurate translation and dubbing could under the circumstances appear here?
A: You need to understand that nobody wants to ornament their film with obscenities – it always greatly affects the box office. That is, as soon as the age is limited, revenues drop. Any well-known blockbuster, like The Pirates of the Caribbean, is a good watch for the whole family, nobody uses bad words there. But Tarantino could never earn as much.

In my view, our cinema is not arranged in a way that some films earn more and some less. None of our films earn anything. The recently released feature film Alien has a narrow audience because somebody swears in it. Ultimately, it earned no money at all.

Q: What do you like more, “accurate translations” or “funny” ones? Doing which ones gives you more joy?
A: I have released six “funny translations”, have not been able to do more. All jokers have limits, as soon as you grasp their joking clichés you stop finding it funny. I think I have fizzled out. And as soon as I felt I had, I stopped doing it.

Q: Does it take you long to find music for the “funny translations”? What is the process usually like, an insight or meticulous film watching?
A: Doing one such film took 4 to 5 months. This is a very long, quite complex and tedious work. Most of the work is done through insight.

Q: Do you absolutely rule out going back to the genre. If a film like The Lord of the Rings comes out, would you make an exception?
A: I have just lost interest in it. Why would you want to do something you have no interest in?..

Q: Then, please, tell us which field is these days of interest to you.
A: I mostly do normal correct translations that I call “accurate”. That is, I translate films within my own understanding, knowledge and ability. After that, I show the films with live translation, I take the English copy and dub it, sitting in the hall.

Such screenings always attract crowds. The recent record was 2.5 thousand viewers in the Moscow’s Pushkinsky theatre. When the film is released in a dubbed version, however, nobody wants to watch it. This happens because the translation is bad, dubbing is horrible, and the film ends up being completely different. It is more important to know your own language than the other, and to speak it well.

Last year, I did a translation of Adrenaline-2, and it generated in Russia half of the revenues in the US.

Q: Which recent domestically done, other than yours, translations do you like the most?
A: I practically do not see them. If you know a language well, it makes no sense. Generally, they are all mediocre. This mostly happens because translators kill off all the jokes and then use less than good actors to do the dubbing. The result is a completely different film.

Q: Do you make mistakes in your translations?
A: I do. They are frequently related to working conditions. Hollywood producers are often unable to provide the entire film due to pirates raging in Russia, and only give the protagonists’ lines. But with only text on hand, it is sometimes outright impossible to understand what happens on the screen.

Some errors are accidental, of course.

Q: Let’s talk about another branch of your work, gaming industry. According to the gaming press, you make fairly good computer games.
A: The best ones.

Q: “Vault Keepers”, “The truth about the 9th company” are great games. Do you plan to continue working in this area?
A: I do insist Vault Keepers in 2006 was the best Russian game, collecting all the prizes there were.

The gaming industry has been affected by the crisis. Nearly all the domestic firms stopped making games, as it is quite an expensive thing, budgets go from one million dollars and higher. Everyone is mostly focused on cinema, although computer games earn much more that our cinema does. But there is no this kind of money for the moment, so the planned third part [of Vault Keepers - TI] has been hanging out.

Translating computer games is very difficult, by the way. In action games, with running and shooting, it is quite easy, but in role games there could be volumes. Whereas the price is the same as for action. Killing three months to get a one-month’s salary makes no sense. This is why I do not translate books.

Q: Dmitry, you are now as popular as the translation guru Leonid Volodarsky once was. Do you consider him your teacher?
A: Comparing cable TV to VCRs is strange. How could you compare the present day’s spread of video to the past? There is nothing in common between what happened with comrade Volodarsky and me. I had to watch what Volodarsky translated – he was horrendously prolific, and video tapes in English were impossible to get. I do not consider him my teacher, he did bad translations, and I would not be able to learn anything worthy from them.

Q: Is it true you used to work as a militia officer?
A: I did, for six years. I began as a militia officer and ended up a senior detective.

Q: Considering this, did translating Cop Out put you in a nostalgic mood?
A: Not really, it is just that there has to be certain specialisation. There are translators specialised in Shakespeare. And I am an expert on policemen, villains, military and bad Negros – this is what I am the best at.

Q: Are there films you would like to translate but have not yet?
A: They are quite a few. We in Russia have a very peculiar system, because our capitalism set in a short while ago. Film copyright in Russia, for instance, is owned by various firms that pursue their own interests. Such fragmentation and disunity result in difficulties when establishing contacts with all of them, the more so when trying to balance out their interests.

Q: Do you plan to cover foreign film festivals?
A: I regularly attend festivals. Ten to twenty journalists from one edition go there, to cover it. One cannot physically watch personally everything that is demonstrated, 400 films in 10 days.

All festivals have two halves. There is an iceberg tip, the so-called competition programme, where they feature director Polanski or somebody else like him. And there is film market that makes the body of the event. This is where they show what people watch - transformers, terminators, et cetera. These are commercially successful films that I watch at film festivals, 3-4 a day. I physically cannot tell something about them or shoot.

Prepared by Kristina Ivanova